


and if my wishes came true (it would've been you)

by cloudchasers_xx



Category: Designated Survivor (TV)
Genre: God this is sad, eventual emily/aaron FOR PLOT REASONS, lol emily and aaron get married, not usually how i write but i wanted to try a new style, screw the show pardon my french, the ending is sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:15:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26712793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudchasers_xx/pseuds/cloudchasers_xx
Summary: she doesn't know how to go back tobefore.they were always a special brand ofsomething,something without boundaries, without borders. they were doomed from the start, hannah realizes, destined to wonder what it could've been. she wonders if aaron ever wonders.she supposes not.
Relationships: Aaron Shore/Hannah Wells, Emily Rhodes/Aaron Shore
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	and if my wishes came true (it would've been you)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hideous_Sun_Demon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hideous_Sun_Demon/gifts).



> HAHA BYE i love pain,, anyways this is based on this is how you lose her by junot diaz, never actually read the book but this fic is based on this quote:
> 
> “then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.
> 
> this is how you lose her.”

this is how she leaves.

the affair is quiet—there is no crying, and no screaming. she doesn’t take much (there hadn’t been much to begin with), and yet when hannah looks around _their_ apartment, she only sees the spaces that have been left behind, the empty shapes around which dust has collected. soon those spots will be filled as well, she thinks, with its own thin layer of dust, and it’ll be like she was never there. she can’t bear the thought.

vaguely, hannah wonders when, exactly, she had managed to lock herself into a cage and give aaron the only key.

* * *

she doesn't know how to go back to before. they were always a special brand of _something_ , something without boundaries, without borders. to hannah, it feels like they’ve always been inseparable—hannah and aaron, aaron and hannah. there isn’t a before, just like how to hannah, there isn’t an after, there is just the two of them, indelibly intertwined. they were doomed from the start, hannah realizes, destined to wonder what it could've been. she wonders if aaron ever wonders.

she supposes not.

* * *

“this is for you,” are the words that aaron says to her at work, sliding a viciously red hued envelope across the desk, ink stained dark on the paper.

she had heard about it, of course, as she had stood by the coffee machine earlier in the morning waiting for her shitty brew to finish, seth and lyor talking about it in hushed voices—or at least, what they thought were hushed voices—as kendra shot her worried looks from her perch across the room. she smiles—she’s always been good at keeping her own secrets—at them, and if her hands tremble a little as she pours milk into her shitty coffee, they’re too nice to say anything about it.

she looks up at aaron, who is still watching her carefully, and reaches out to teasingly push him a little. her fingers smooth across the soft fabric stretched tightly across his chest. “thought i’d never get mine,” she jokes. warmth seeps into her fingertips and she retracts her hand quickly, burned.

something twists viciously in her gut when aaron gives her a soft smile in return, all too familiar dimples coming out in full force. “you know what they say,” he says, “best for last.” he shrugs. “i saved you for last,” he continues, and if that’s a joke, hannah thinks it a particularly cruel one.

* * *

“you’re really going to marry her,” she slurs into the phone, a night when she’s had too much to drink and it feels like the night is eating her whole. she welcomes the darkness, sinks into its embrace. _she doesn’t deserve you_ , she thinks, but she still has enough presence of mind to keep that thought locked tightly away. _sh_ _e is rough lines and teeth bared where you are tender skin and soft eyed, and you will give and give and give and she will take, take, take. she will hurt you—not on purpose, no, but with her callous words and stubborn mouth—and you will become another careless casualty of her war. she will try to offer you the world when you have always wanted to claim it on your own, and she will risk you in her greed to hold the both of you in her hand._

bile churns in her stomach and she presses the palm of her hand to her mouth, barely making it in time to the bathroom, heaving into the toilet. tears sting her eyes and her head spins.

she hears her phone beep from where she left it behind in the living room—

she ignores it.

* * *

the thing is, before hannah and aaron, there was emily and aaron.

after hannah and aaron, there’s still emily and aaron.

* * *

she sees them at work—emily comes to pick up aaron for lunch breaks every other day, and the smile that aaron gives her is too familiar in a heartbreaking way. their honeymoon is planned for greece, she overhears from seth, whose voice carries through the walls, and hannah can’t help but imagine aaron getting tanned on the beach, sun glazing his fair skin and giving him faint freckles, like the time they had gone to see the ocean and they had both gotten sunburned on their cheeks, and hannah had looked into the horizon as the sun set, aaron gripping her hand tightly, and realized that she loved him.

she lets him go.

* * *

_this is how you lose him._

**Author's Note:**

> :D


End file.
